Paul R Goldin
University of PennsylvaniaThe
Date of the Zuozhuan and the Hermeneutics of EmmentalerPanel: The Historiography of Spring and Autumn
AAS Convention, Chicago, 24 March 2001

The
following is a position paper composed for this panel at Bruce's kind invitation.
It is not a research paper or a rigorous study; the allotted time permits me to
state my views, but not to defend them.

The
date of the Zuozhuan is a significant scholarly issue for two reasons. First,
the Zuozhuan is a monumental work covering a period that is among the most poorly
understood in all of Chinese history. Scholars are eager to know more about how
they can use this source. Second, there are few internal clues in the text
that researchers can exploit to establish firm absolute dates. To be sure,
passages are routinely provided with specific dates, but therein lies the problem:
there is usually no external confirmation, so it is not clear whether the accounts
are contemporaneous with the events that they describe, or whether they were written
at a later time. Compounding this ambiguity is the possibility that the text
may quote or incorporate genuine ancient documents.

There
are two general camps, which for the sake of convenience I shall call "Chunqiu"
and "Zhanguo." The Chunqiu view is that the Zuozhuan is a primary document from
Chunqiu times and thus can be used as a source for Chunqiu history. In practice,
this point of view comes in two forms: a strong form claiming that the entire
text - or at least the overwhelming majority of it, excluding postulated interpolations
- dates from the Chunqiu; and a weak form claiming that the received text may
be the product of a Warring States redactor, but that the text still contains
large sections of genuine Chunqiu material.

The
Zhanguo view, by contrast, holds that the text was compiled in Warring States
times and conveys a retrospective and romanticized image of Chunqiu history. According
to this view, the Zuozhuan is still vitally important to the intellectual history
of the Warring States and Imperial eras, but is not much more appropriate as a
source for Chunqiu history than, say, the Sanguo Yanyi for the Three Kingdoms.

Any
interpretation of the Zuozhuan must deal with a substantial number of passages
that can only be considered "errors." These include: prognostications that history
does not confirm until long after the end of the Chunqiu period; prognostications
that history subsequently refutes - again, long after the end of the Chunqiu period;
mistaken astronomical information that must reflect later calculations rather
than contemporary observations; and outright anachronisms. (In the last category,
Bruce frequently - and rightly - points to the absurd story about the casting
of iron vessels inscribed with a penal code). These issues have been discussed
at length by eminent scholars, so I need not rehearse the details here. Yang Bojun
concludes on the basis of the prognostications that the text must have been compiled
between the years 403 and 389. The magnitude of the error in certain astronomical
data, similarly, suggests a date of c365.

I
think these passages are devastating to the Chunqiu view. Taken singly, any one
of them might be dismissed as inconclusive; but collectively, they are compelling
because they all point in the same direction. Moreover, it is rarely stressed
that these are the only passages in the entire text that can be dated directly. The
point is not that there happen to be a few odd passages incompatible with the
Chunqiu theory. All the datable passages in the entire text are from no
earlier than the 4th century, whereas no proponent of the Chunqiu view has ever
identified a single passage that must antedate the Warring States. The
score is about 20-0. [Note 1]

Chunqiu
advocates usually sidestep this problem by declaring these passages to be interpolations,
and then dispensing with them entirely. This is what I mean by the "hermeneutics
of Emmentaler." As more and more of these alleged interpolations are discovered
and promptly removed from consideration, the image of the text that emerges is
that of a great wheel of Swiss cheese, with Zhanguo bubbles and Chunqiu interstices.
One cannot identify a passage as an "interpolation" simply because it is inconvenient
to one's theories about the date and composition of a text. There must be
some linguistic or philological protocol. But these are rarely offered; nor are
we often told how and why a later writer goes about surreptitiously interpolating
things like prognostications that history eventually proves untrue.

These points are well known, and yet Chunqiu
advocates still live and breathe among us, so their sense must be that the overall
quality of the text is sufficiently Chunqiu-ish that the "error" passages may
be disregarded as the manifestations of careless Warring States packaging. This
would be a "weak form" of the Chunqiu view. My sense, on the contrary, is that
the overall quality of the text is extremely fourth-century-ish. The language
sounds like archaizing fourth-century writing - though I am aware that this matter
has been hotly debated, without any irrefutable arguments on either side. One
inadequately appreciated point concerns the use of the word dao in the Zuozhuan
as an ethical term. This is rare in textual and palaeographic literature
from before the Warring States. There are sporadic occurrences - one in the "Junshi,"
for instance, and Shi 245 refers to the dao of Houji - but in the Zuozhuan, this
sense is attested far more than sporadically. The Fraser-Lockhart Index lists
dozens of References under such categories as "good government," "the way, path
of duty, reason," "principle," "general rule." We know now from
the Guodian manuscripts (among other texts) that the dao was a crucial ethical
and political concept in fourth-century philosophy, but there is not much evidence
that it enjoyed this status before then.

Next,
there are certain bizarre features of the narrative in the Zuozhuan that are not
easily compatible with the Chunqiu thesis. Take the character of Lord Mu of Qin.
In the Battle of Han (Xi 15) for example, he is portrayed as a paragon of virtue
and forbearance; he attacks Jin only in order to punish its treacherous ruler,
Yiwu; after capturing Yiwu, Lord Mu spares his prisoner and eventually returns
him to his homeland; and in the aftermath of his victory, Lord Mu continues to
treat the nation of Jin kindly, because his quarrel has been not with its people,
but with its lord. His troops, moreover, are said to be possessed of great fighting
spirit, and he commands them with insight and aplomb. Above all, he listens
to his advisors.

Then, eighteen years
later, in the Battle of Yao (Xi 32-33), Lord Mu plans an unsound campaign of conquest
despite the pointed remonstrances of his ministers. Now he exemplifies
all the commonplace characteristics of a doomed ruler in the Zuozhuan: he is overconfident,
has no sense of ritual, and is greedy for territory. Of course, his forces are
smashed and he is humiliated.

Lord Mu
was not a perfect ruler - this is the same Lord Mu who forced those three good
brothers to be buried alive with him when he died - but there is no hint in the
account of the Battle of Han that he was the kind of ruler who would ignore the
counsel of sage ministers in a vain attempt to seize a few scraps of territory.
It is shocking that the same man should make all the shortsighted mistakes that,
eighteen years earlier, he so wisely identified and so admirably avoided.

I think this difficulty is a consequence
of the competing constraints on the author or authors of the Zuozhuan: the philosophical
theory, on the one hand, that Heaven always helps the virtuous defeat the iniquitous;
and the historical fact, on the other hand, that Qin defeated Jin in 645 but was
defeated by the same enemy in 627. In the Battle of Han, the author is compelled
to portray Lord Mu as a moral hero and Yiwu as a tyrant; the Battle of Yao is
written as simply another episode in the ongoing struggle between right and wrong
- but this time, Lord Mu must be depicted as the personification of impropriety. Neither
of these passages tells us very much about the real Lord Mu.

One
final, general comment about the battle scenes in the Zuozhuan: they read
like the nostalgic chimeras of later ages, and not like forthright contemporary
accounts. They are all about heroism, honor, and Heaven-ordained victory or defeat;
they glorify individual valor and condemn ignominious folly, with little consideration
of practical concerns such as strategy and logistics. Moreover, they never convey
the horrors and atrocities of war: the reader is spared the gruesome sight of
civilians raped and slaughtered, the cries of tortured prisoners, or even the
inevitable stench of corpses decaying on the battlefield. As a genre, they are
more like Mallory - or Homer, to follow Eric Henry's suggestion - than The Face
of Battle, and are therefore highly suspicious as historical documents.

In conclusion, the Zuozhuan espouses
fourth-century ideas in fourth-century language, and every datable passage in
it must be assigned to the fourth century. I believe it is a fourth-century text.

Notes

Note
1. On the WSW E-mail list, Yuri Pines (Message 3088, August 8, 2001) cites two
mistaken predictions (Xi 23, Jin will be the last of the Ji states to perish;
and Xiang 31, Zheng will enjoy several generations of good fortune) that imply
a date before the 4th century. Pines himself suggests a latest plausible date
of 450. [Return to text]